Wednesday, 3 February 2016

Last week we
held our ninth team meeting of the TW:eed Team, this time at the University of
Leicester.

As always it
was a busy meeting packed full of scientific discoveries and was really
inspiring! Jenny Clack and Tim Smithson revealed some fascinating work they
have been doing to identify evidence of a terrestrial mode of life in the
fossilised tetrapod bones. This new work is really exciting and examines many different lines of evidence from the new specimens we have found, comparing them to Devonian and Late Carboniferous tetrapods.

Sarah Davies presented work in collaboration with
Janet Sherwin on the more marine sequences from Northumberland, and how they
differ from the Tweed Basin. I talked about the sedimentology of tetrapod sites
and what it can tell us. We hear the latest on the palynology work from Emma
Reeves and John Marshall, with huge datasets coming together that will help us both
correlate the tetrapod sites, and learn more about the vegetation and climate. University
of Leicester Master’s students Levi Curry and Hattie Dulson led a workshop on
microfossils and their research projects.

Members of the TW:eed Team at the
University of Leicester

As a team we
are working on many new research papers and presenting at upcoming conferences –
as the project is drawing to a close this year it is great that our results are
coming together – we now have a much better picture of the ancient tetrapod world
and early life on land.

We are all very
excited about the Fossil Hunters museum exhibit that is opening soon! At the meeting we watched previews of the
videos being used in the exhibit, its fantastic! Here is another reconstruction
scene from the exhibit, drawn by palaeo artist Mark Witton – wow!